Commodore Amiga 2000 Teardown

Commodore Amiga 2000

In 1986-87, Commodore released the Amiga 2000. The machine was technically similar to the Amiga 500, but had a larger case and was designed to be more expandable. Costing around $1,500 (US), the Amiga 2000 was designed to compete with the much more expensive Apple Macintosh II (~$5,500) and IBM PC (~$3,000). Follow along as we crack open the second generation he Amiga 2000--the Amgia B2000-CR.

Updated 1/8/2011: Dave Haynie, lead engineer for the Amiga 2000 (B2000-CR), has posted several comments about the Amiga 2000 and his worked on the project in this gallery's discussion forum. I encourage everyone to read his posts. And, I would like to thank Mr. Haynie for taking the time to share his experiences.

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Amiga 2000: Case Logo

The Amiga 2000 was designed to be the high-end version of the Amiga 500 and successor to the popular Amiga 1000.

We purchased this Commodore Amiga 2000 (B2000-CR) for about $200 from an online auction. It arrived without a keyboard, documentation, or software.

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Amiga 2000: Front

Along the front of the Amiga 2000 are the power and hard disk activity lights, two bays for 3.5" disk drives, one bay for a 5.25" drive, 5-pin DIN femal keyboard port, and two DE-9 RS-232 serial ports (used for a mouse or other controller).

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Amiga 2000: Power and Hard Disk activity lights

The plastic housing for the Power and Hard Disk activity lights doesn't sit flush with the front cover on this Amiga 2000. We'll have to take the cover off to see what's causing the problem.

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Amiga 2000: External 3.5" and 5.25" drives

The Amiga 2000 can accomodate two 3.5" drives and a single 5.25" drive. This unit has two 3.5" drive, but no 5.25" drive--thus the rectangular plastic panel below the two 3.5" drives.

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Amiga 2000: Front keyboard and mouse/controller ports

The Amiga 2000 has a 5-pin DIN female keyboard port and two DE-9 RS-232 serial ports (for a mouse, joystick, or other controller).

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Amiga 2000: Side

Other than the two case srews, there's nothing of note on either side of the Amiga 2000.

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Amiga 2000: Back

Along the back of the Amiga 2000 are the power switch, C14 power inlet, power supply cooling fan vent, and external ports.

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Amiga 2000: Power switch, C14 power inlet, and PSU cooling fan vent

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Amiga 2000: Rear external ports

The following ports are located on the back of the Amiga 2000:

Video: DB-23 male (Analog RGB)

Parallel Port: DB-25 female (Centronics)

Disk Drive: DB-23 female (external floppy drive)

Mono Video: Composite (black and white)

Stereo audio RCA jacks

Serial Port: DB-25 male RS-232

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Amiga 2000: Rear expansion slot plates

The Amiga 2000 has nine expansion slots, broken down as follows:

Five Zorro II (proprietary) slots

Two 8-bit ISA slots

Two 16-bit ISA in line with Zorro II slots

None of the slots are being used on this machine.

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Amiga 2000: Very dusty PSU fan

There is a lot of dust on the inside of this Amiga 2000's PSU cooling fan. This doesn't bode well for the cleanlines of the other internal components.

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Amiga 2000: Removing the external case screws

The first step in cracking open this Amiga 2000 is to remove the two screws on each side of the metal case.

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Amiga 2000: External case screws removed

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Amiga 2000: Rear external case screw

A single case screw is located on the back of the Amiga 2000. Unfortunately, someone installed this machine's case without first removing the screw.

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Amiga 2000: Lifting off the case

After removing all the external case screws, you can lift the top of the metal case away from the Amiga 2000.

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Amiga 2000: First look inside

With the top of the case removed, we get our first look inside the Amiga 2000.

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Amiga 2000: Front with top cover removed

With the top half of the case and attached front cover removed, we can see this machines two 3.5" disk drives and the plastic housing for the Power and Hard Drive activity lights.

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Amiga 2000: Dusty case

There is a lot of dust inside this Amiga 2000's case.

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Amiga 2000: Power and Hard Disk activity lights

The Amiga 2000's Power and Hard Disk activity lights are mounted on a plastic stand that sticks out from the internal metal case. Despite the presence of a Hard Disk activity light, this machine did not come with an internal hard drive.

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Amiga 2000: Internal side view

Looking at the Amiga 2000 from the side, we can see part of the motherboard. Some of the board is covered with a large metal frame, which holds the power supply unit, two 3.5" drives, and 5.25" drive (if one was present).

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Amiga 2000: Dusty motherboard

More dust has accumulated on the motherboard.

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Amiga 2000: 3.5" disk drive cables

This Amiga 2000 definitely wouldn't have worked in this condition. It seems that a previous owner disconnected most of the 3.5" disk drive cables before shipping the machine.

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Amiga 2000: Detaching the 3.5" drive cables

Before removing the 3.5" disk drives, we'll need to disconnect that power and data cables. As I noted on the previous photo, someone had already detached most of the drive cables. I'll remove the lone power cable that remained attached.

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Amiga 2000: 3.5" disk drive ribbon cable and small circuit board

A small circuit board is attached to the end of the ribbon cable. Neither of this cable's connectors were attached to the 3.5" drives.

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Amiga 2000: 34-pin connector on ribbon cable circuit board

The both the ribbon cable and the small circuit board have 34-pin female connectors--matching the 34-pin male connectors on the two 3.5" drives. I'm not 100 percent sure of the the circuit board's function, but it could simply facilitate the connection of drives when mounted next to each other--instead of on top of each other.

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Amiga 2000: Removing the 3.5" drive mounting plate screws

With all the cables disconnected, we can remove the metal plate holding the Amiga 2000's two 3.5" drives. Four screws (two on each side) hold the disk drive mounting plate to the internal metal frame.

With all four screws removed, we can lift the mounting plate, and attached drives, away from the Amiga 2000's internal metal frame.

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Amiga 2000: 3.5" drive still attached to mounting plate (top)

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Amiga 2000: 3.5" drive still attached to mounting plate (bottom)

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Amiga 2000: Removing the 3.5" drive screws

Four screws hold each of the Amiage 2000's 3.5" drives to the mounting plate.

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Amiga 2000: 3.5" drives removed from mounting plate

With the screws removed, the Amiga 2000's 3.5" drives can be separated from the mounting plate. Small plastic spacers were used on the thinner drive (right).

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Amiga 2000: 3.5" drive mounting plate

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Amiga 2000: Very dusty 3.5" drive mounting plate

Like the other internal surfaces on this Amiga 2000, the 3.5" drive mounting plate is covered with dust.

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Amiga 2000: Fujitsu M2532K-19A 3.5" disk drive - Top

One of the 3.5" disk drives in this Amiga 2000 was a Fujitsu M2532K-19A.

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Amiga 2000: Fujitsu M2532K-19A 3.5" disk drive - Top

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Amiga 2000: Fujitsu M2532K-19A 3.5" disk drive - Label

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Amiga 2000: Fujitsu M2532K-19A 3.5" disk drive burned wire

Even if I had connected all the cables and powered on this Amiga 2000, I doubt its Fujitsu M2532K-19A drive would have worked. A thin wire soldered to the underside of the drive appears to have melted and torn. Note the charred shielding and broken wire.

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Amiga 2000: Chinon FB-35A 3.5" disk drive - Top

The second 3.5" disk drive in this Amiga 2000 was a Chinon FB-35A. Although the company dabbled in computer compents and peripherals, Chinon was best known in Japan as a camera manufacturer.

Amiga 2000: Chinon FB-35A 3.5" disk drive - Label

With the 3.5" drives and mounting plate removed, we'll turn our attention to the large, internal metal frame, which also holds the power supply.

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Amiga 2000: Removing the front screws on the internal metal frame

Three screws hold the front of the metal frame to the lower half of the Amiga 2000's metal case.

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Amiga 2000: Removing the rear screws on the internal metal frame

Four screws hold the back of internal metal frame to the lower half of the Amiga 2000's metal case.

Photo by: Bill Detwiler / TechRepublicCaption by: Bill Detwiler

Amiga 2000: Internal metal frame lifted away from the case

With the seven screws removed, you can lift the internal metal frame away from the Amiga 2000's case. Before we can completely separated the frame of the case, we'll need to disconnect the motherboard's power cable.

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Amiga 2000: Motherboard power supply connector

You'll need to disconnect the motherboard's power cable before completely removing the Amiga 2000's internal metal frame and attached power supply.

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Amiga 2000: Internal metal frame and power supply

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Amiga 2000: Power supply held to internal frame with two screws

Two screws should hold the Amiga 2000's power supply securely to the internal metal frame, but one of the screws in missing and the other is connected only to the frame and not the power supply.

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Amiga 2000: Lifting the power supply away from the internal frame

As no screws are holding the Amiga 2000's power supply to the internal frame, we can lift the supply away from the frame.

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Amiga 2000: Power supply and internal metal frame -- Separated

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Amiga 2000: Elec & Eltek 420504-SD power supply

This Amiga 2000 has an Elec & Eltek 420504-SD power supply.

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While I normally recommend you don't crack open PC power supplies, I'm going to carefully remove this supply's cover

Warning: Computer power supply units (PSUs) contain components that can deliver dangerous electric shocks. The capcitors inside most PSUs can retain an electrical charge for a long time after being removed from a power source. You should never open or work on a PSU without proper training.

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Amiga 2000: Power supply unit warning label

Note the warning label of the other side of the Amiga 2000's power supply unit.

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Amiga 2000: Power supply unit and cover

With the cover removed, we get our first look inside the Amiga 2000's power supply unit. Remember, look but don't touch!

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Amiga 2000: Dust and grime inside the power supply unit

Wow. There's a lot of dust and grime inside this Amiga 2000's power supply unit. I will not be cleaning, or even touching these components.

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Amiga 2000: Internal metal frame removed

With the internal metal frame and attached components removed, we can finally see the entire Amiga 2000's motherboard.

Before removing the motherboard from the lower half of the Amiga 2000's case, we'll need to disconnect the ribbon cable for the two 3.5" disk drives.

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Amiga 2000: Disconnecting the Power light cable

We'll also need to disconnect the cable for the Amiga 2000's Power light. Although this Amiga 2000 has a Hard Disk activity light, it did not come with a hard drive. A SCSI hard drive was available on A2000HD systems.

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Amiga 2000: Removing the Power and Hard Disk activity lights

With the Power and Hard Disk activity light cable disconnected, you can pop the plastic stand off the lower half of the Amiga 2000's metal case.

Amiga 2000: Power and Hard Disk activity lights and cables

With the internal metal frame, drives, power supply, and cables removed, we can begin removing the Amiga 200's motherboard from the lower half of the case.

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Amiga 2000: Removing the motherboard screws

Several screws hold the Amiga 2000's motherboard and attached plate to the lower half of the case.

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Amiga 2000: Removing the lower expansion slot screws

Once you've removed all the screws holding the the motherboard to the case, you'll also need to remove the bottom screws from the expansion slot covers above the rear ports. These metal covers slightly overlap the metal shield that surrounds the rear ports. You don't actually need to remove the three covers, just remove the lower screw and then swing the covers up enough to slide out the motherboard and attached metal plate.

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Amiga 2000:

Once you've removed motherboard screws and pushed aside the expansion slot covers, you can lift the motherboard away from the Amiga 2000's case.

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Amiga 2000: Lower half of the case

With the motherboard removed, there's nothing left inside the lower half of the Amiga 2000's case.

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Amiga 2000: Motherboard (prior to cleaning)

This Amiga 2000 (B2000-CR) has five Zorro II (Amiga proprietary) slots, two 16-bit ISA slots, two 8-bit ISA slots, one video slot connector, and one 32-pin disk drive connector. The four ISA slots will only provide power to attached cards. The Amiga doesn't have the ability to navtively communicate with these type of cards. However, using a Commodore bridgeboard the slot could be activated and used.

As with all the surfaces within this machine, the motherboard is covered with dust. Before taking any close-up shots of the chips, I'm going to spen a little time and effort cleaning off the dust.

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Amiga 2000: Motherboard (after cleaning)

After 20 minutes of blowing and wiping away the dust, this Amiga 2000 motherboard looks much better.

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Amiga 2000: Motherboard - Bottom

I'm going to leave the metal plate attached to the bottom of the motherboard. There's really nothing put solder points under it.

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Amiga 2000: Motherboard

Now that we have cleaner motherboard, let's take a look at the chips on this classic Amiga 2000.

The Amiga 2000 used a 7.16 MHz Motorola 68000 processor. In addition to Motorola, several companies also manufactured the chip. From this chip's markings, I believe it is a 68000 microprocessor manufactured by Signetics. This chip has the markings:

S
SCN68000C8N64
QFJ1385
8729KD

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Amiga 2000: MOS 8372 "Agnus" chipset

This square chip is part of the MOS Technology "Angus" 8372 chipset. I'm not 100 percent certain, but I believe it is the address generator chip. It has the following markings:

M05
8372
3688 23 B

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Amiga 2000: NEC 315093-02 256K ROM

I believe this chip is the NEC 315093-02 256K ROM that contains the Amiga 2000's Kickstart code. It has the markings:

NEC
Japan 8939ED
315093-02 297
1988 CBM

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Amiga 2000: CBM 5719 Gary Gate Array

This chip is the CBM (Commodore Business Machines) 5719 Gary Gate Array. It has the following markings:

Amiga 2000: MOS 8520A-1 complex interface adapter (CIA) chip

This chip is the MOS 8520A-1 complex interface adapter. It has the following markings:

MOS
8520A-1
2887 24

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Amiga 2000: CSG 8520A-1 complex interface adapter (CIA) chip

This chip is the CSG 8520A-1 complex interface adapter. It has the following markings:

CSG
8520A-1
3491 24

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Amiga 2000: Bus Terminator "Buster" 5721 Rev. A 318075-02

This chip is the bus controller "Buster" 5721 Rev. A 318075-02. It has the following markings:

L1A3420
COMMODORE
318075-02
CAA8742

Edited 1/8/2011: I orginally noted that this Buster chip was the "bus terminator". Luckily, Dave Haynie jumped into this gallery's discussion thread and set me straight. The Buster was the "bus controller" not the bus terminator.

Mr. Haynie was also kinda enough to supply a lot more great information about the Amiga 2000 and his work on the project. I can't thank him enough for taking the time to do this.

Amiga 2000: Sanyo LM33256G-15 256kbit memory chips

Amiga 2000: Motherboard Markings AMIGA B2000-CR HAYNIE/FISHER

This Amiga 2000 has the following markings on the motherboard:

AMIGA B2000-CR
HAYNIE/FISHER
A/W 312723 REV 4.1

The original Amiga 2000 (A2000) was designed and manufactured in Germany. It was based on a German Amiga 1000 motherboard. But not long after launch of the A2000, Commodore engineers redesinged the machine, using technology from both the original German design and the Amiga 500.

The first set of markings denote this machine as a redesigned Amiga B2000-CR (Cost Reduction). But more interstingly, the markings "HAYNIE/FISHER" refer to Commodore engineers who worked on the B2000-CR. Dave Haynie was primary engineer on the Amiga B2000-CR (Cost Reduction), and Terry Fisher designed the motherboard.

This is the first time I have seen the names of a computer's designers printed on the machine's motherboard.

For more information on the history of the Amiga 2000, including several quotes and posts from Dave Haynie, check out the following links:

Amiga 2000: Completely disassembled

Like many desktop computers of its time, the Amiga 2000 is built like a tank. It is covered with a heavy metal case, has an internal metal frame that holds the power supply and disk drives, and uses large Phillips screws. Disassembling the Amiga is a dream compared to cracking open todays tablets and smartphones.

Commodore Amiga 2000

In 1986-87, Commodore released the Amiga 2000. The machine was technically similar to the Amiga 500, but had a larger case and was designed to be more expandable. Costing around $1,500 (US), the Amiga 2000 was designed to compete with the much more expensive Apple Macintosh II (~$5,500) and IBM PC (~$3,000). Follow along as we crack open the second generation he Amiga 2000--the Amgia B2000-CR.

Updated 1/8/2011: Dave Haynie, lead engineer for the Amiga 2000 (B2000-CR), has posted several comments about the Amiga 2000 and his worked on the project in this gallery's discussion forum. I encourage everyone to read his posts. And, I would like to thank Mr. Haynie for taking the time to share his experiences.

Photo by: Bill Detwiler / TechRepublicCaption by: Bill Detwiler

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Full Bio

Bill Detwiler is Managing Editor of TechRepublic and Tech Pro Research and the host of Cracking Open, CNET and TechRepublic's popular online show. Prior to joining TechRepublic in 2000, Bill was an IT manager, database administrator, and desktop support specialist in the social research and energy industries. He has bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Louisville, where he has also lectured on computer crime and crime prevention.

Back in 1986, almost all computers were dogs. Stupid, stubborn and, worse than dogs, dull. The Amiga was the liberator. With very little money, I was digitizing stop-action animation (New-Tek digiview), sequencing and sampling sounds (linking via MIDI to my Casio CZ-101), rendering infographics in paint programs sucking data from spreadsheets (via AREXX), banging out code to render beautiful fractals. Sharing cool hacks with a great community. I never got around to playing any games. It was geek heaven for a kid on a shoestring. Thanks, Dave, Jay (RIP), et. al!

Macs are pcs always have been the same just different cpu in the beginning same underlying inferior bus architecture. any 68040 can beat a dual g5 mac - why architecture - basically 22 programmed cpus and now u brag about 8 normal non preprogramed cpus that suck and intel and amd admits to it- phipp sad very sad.1947 technology and no improvement since then . Intel has admitted to this.
Heck , they have to pay royalties to Motorola as they own the technology that they left in 1969 for the one they invented now and use.

NO they used the Amiga only thru out the series I was in the back of it. It was only a rumor started by mac and pc people , and the producer used it to hide that the amga was still being used. They actually used the faster amiga the itanium- amiga clone also one of the first the first 20 went to bell south who still have them and more- yes intel own amiga . Fact

Hi, (proud Amiga 500 user here!)
this may sound a bit silly but i was curious some time ago about the Commodore factories around the world and the order they have opened and closed and what models were made in those, but didn't find any complete information. Maybe Dave or any other user can post some info on that in this thread.
Thanks for this teardown,
chapas

I still have my 3000, a 68000 @ 66Mhz, Their "Workbench" GUI, simple and still unequaled, true desktop multitasking unapproachable until Linux gained momentum,
My 3000 still renders complex graphics with an air of authority and ease that leaves the uninitiated with a firm chin print in their lap.
All of us would be talking about our Amiga's today were it not for some incredibly bad decisions, Talk about snatching defeat from the craws of victory, I still can't believe no efforts were made towards preserving the intellectual propertys.
One of the major "faux pas", management really ticked off one of their primary "Dreamers" the very brilliant and resourceful Bill Crockett, who left and began
Ensoniq, a musical instrument mfr ( keyboards, digital samplers and programmable hearing aids). The Ensoniq "Mirage" was the first affordable stage worthy sampler within the reach of a performing musicians budget, Ray Kurzweil's K250 was an awesome instrument with a price to match, the Emu "emulator, portable but dear, then there was the "Fairlight" and "Synclavier" both requiring refrigerator sized racks and a second mortgage. Not the ideal piece for a bar gig.
But you could look inside an Ensoniq product with the right eyes and see the genus of Amiga, I was always looking for a "Fat Alice" LSI every time I opened an new Ensoniq instrument.

I restore these beast on a weekly basis. I am in the middle of 2 Amiga A2000's right now (waiting for parts) but this weekend I started on a really sweet A4000, with a Warp Engine and a Cybervision 64 Video card. Pictures can be seen soon on lab.amigalounge.com. There are pictures on Amibay now (under dirty pictures thread) and twitter hashtag #A4000.

I was a mini-computer tech when "personal computers" came out and had a go at an Apple II...bad choice (but the MAC was TOOOO expensive). Then I spotted the Amiga 1000 which used the same CPU, a Motorola 6800, as the MAC but, unlike the MAC, had 1082 (?) color desktop AND was multi-tasking and cheap in price. I remember an OS upgrade costing $25.
I found that the 1000 had all of the developer's signatures embedded in the case (molded in). When that system "went South", I purchased the 3000 and enjoyed that until it too died.
The reason for the demise of the Amiga...Commodore's GREED. They held their conferences in the Bahamas (along with OUR money) and, as the story went, kicked out a visiting complainer about how they were fostering the demise of the Amiga.
That proved to be true when they sold lock, stock and barrel to Dell who promptly buried the only personal computer worth it's salt.
I recall free antivirus support from the Amiga community as well.
Ah me...I'm stuck with my current HP Laptop (MADE IN CHINA), which had to be replaced two months after purchase. Dead motherboard AND hard drive (lost ALL my data before a full backup was possible).
Sorry about the length of this. Hoope you enjoyed reading it!

I never thought I'd read a post from an Amiga designer. Until now.... Thanks for posting. Still have an A1000 and 2 A3000's in the attic. What's a good way to get them working again if need be? Haven't used them in over 10 years.

I had an A2000 with 4MB Supra-Ram card and a SUPRA-SCSI card driving 2 miniscribe 20mb hard drives. Was the hottest rig in the local BBS/modem scene for a brilliant moment there.
Also had the Newtek Digiview Gold and Audio digitizers with the robotic color wheel for doing color scans.
I'm sure you've all downloaded some of my early work done on the Digiview at some point.
;)

I still have mine, it still works! I left it on the shelf once for 10 years, 1998 to 2008, and when I hooked her up and turned her on, the on-board time clock was only off by 4 minutes! Still had correct day and date! ASTOUNDING MACHINE! (Thanks, Dave!)
AND I still use it as an on-the-fly A/B roll video mixer!
I have an original A2000 with 10 meg ram, 2 meg onboard chip, and a 120 gig hard drive.
The way I have always described the Amiga and Video was like this:
What the Amiga/Toaster does with video, it does very well and very smoothly and with incredible finesse; At the time, I had professional studios hiring me to edit for them due to the quality of the toaster output!
What the IBM/Windows platform does to video is not done nearly as well, or nearly as smooth, but with ABSOLUTE BRUTE FORCE! Enough RAM & Harddrive and a quad-core processor - 2011 technology - doesn't hold a CANDLE to the 20+ year old Amiga/Toaster!
Too bad Amiga didn't have anyone in "product marketing" that had a clue or they could have wiped the field of all competition! Talk about a "gaming" platform!
Sorry for rambling! I STILL get excited about this!

The LF347N is a "Wide Bandwidth Quad JFET Input Operational Amplifier " a popular IC so far. This chip is made by National Semiconductor. The logo on the chip was in use in the late '80. Actually this chip was produced in 1987 (alike other IC on this PCB).

Could go right now & Fire up the A2000,A1200 or A500 & have no doubt they would still work! Or even my Vic20,C64,128,128D or my SX64....... Yeah i know a HARDCORE Commodore fan.
Thanks for the Article! Hope all have tried "Amiga Forever",C64 Emuls.

that Should have been connected to the back of the second drive allowed the user to use a PC Floppy drive with the Amiga 2000: The Amiga FDDs are one of the FEW computers that acually used the SENS switch, which detected the presence or removal of a disk. On PC floppy drives, this signal was on a different pin, and that board thus provided the corrected signal so that the Amiga could detect the insertion of a disk, and Not leave it mounted on the desktop when it was manually removed from the system. Note that the FDD Without the drive door is the Original FDD supplied with the system.

I would like to thanks Mr Haynie for all what he did fow the Amiga. It has been my first computer (A2000 + PC Card). Working with a real full multitasking OS, beautiful simple and efficient hardware was an experience so huge that even today I miss this "KISS" computer.
Then I get an A4000 with graphic card, hoping that we will beat all of them at that time. I was wrong unfurtunaltly, not by the system but by Commodore, such a pain.
I still enjoy some time the OS, using uae (and I still have my ROM 3.1 @ home) ;-)
Thanks again for that time.
Enjoy to get once again, such pleasure.
Regards Dave for all you done.
Laurent

The Mac and PCs haven't caught up yet! My Amiga 1000 had "say" in the file menu along with save and print. I would have it "say" my spreadsheet while my eyes were on the input data to double check against entry errors. AV from the start. And now MS is talking about a second desktop. Even now jaws drops when I pull down the first playfield to reveal the fullscreen bouncing ball hidden behind the first "destop".
pgkuhel@msn.com

I was a commodore fanatic. I had the Vic 20, C64, 64C, 128D, Amiga 500, Amiga 2000, Amiga 3000 and a modified Amiga 2500. I have to agree with mckinnej about the company Commodore. If it were not for the greedy bums who ran it, we would have been idolizing a cpad as apposed to an ipad. At one point in the 90's the three major technologies of PC clones, Macintosh and Commodore were competing for the computer throne as Intel and AMD are now. The Amiga's technology blew away its competition but Commodore blew away its marketing campaign for its on selfishness. I will and forever will be an Amigan....................

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! The Amiga was an awesome machine. Too bad Commodore was run by a bunch of greedy vultures who destroyed the company for their own profit. Hopefully they lost everything quickly and died dirt poor after long and miserable life. (Too harsh? Naaaa... ;)
It's safe to say I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now if it wasn't for my trusty A500. I learned so much on that machine that really isn't possible on today's PCs. It was fun too. Today's machines are too complex and locked down (except for Linux).
I remember spending $800 for a 40meg HD with a 2meg RAM expansion. I had a 14.4 Supramodem too which cost me about $350. I was poor, but a total badazz! LOL
It broke my heart when I moved and had to unload a bunch of old stuff. Since I didn't have a working monitor and couldn't find one, the Amiga went in the dumpster in its original box along with my old Radio Shack Color Computer II, also in original box. Along with them went a yard bag full of floppy disks. It was a sad day. :(

#70: Yeah, that was a Signetics 68000... Hitachi also made them. Commodore, being a chip company, used to crack the lid of any major chip we sourced externally, to analyze the technology. In short, we knew what they cost to make. So we were buying 68000s for $2.50 when Apple was paying $8.00. That gets significant when you make a million or more computers in a year.
#71 Yeah, that's Fat Agnus. The three Amiga chips acted as one. Agnus worried about memory access, and also generated the "register address", which basically told Paula and Denise (the other two chips) who the cycle was for, and which direction. Agnus also contained the bit-blitter, and served as the interface to the CPU.
#72 The ROM was 256K for AmigaOS 1.x, but expanded to 512K for Amiga 2.0. Both sized were supported for the A2000.
#77 Buster doesn't mean "bus terminator", it's the bus controller. The Amiga 2000 bus was fairly simple, but this device (my design) replaced a number of expensive high-speed PAL devices, which were used to implement external Zorro bus controllers on the Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500. This also manages the "coprocessor" protocol, which allows a CPU accelerator card to be dropped into the CPU slot and take over the system from the built-in 68K.
#80 The National Semiconductor LF347 is a quad low-speed operational amplifier. Part of this was used in the reset circuitry -- the "Cntl-Amiga-Amiga" sequence generated a special condition over the two-wire keyboard interface, which was detected and driven as a hardware reset to the system.
#81 Those are HCT244s, which are bus drivers. Those shown are for the chip bus.
#82, #83 These are the bus drivers for the Zorro bus, address and data. These are bidirectional.. both data and address can be driven either way.
#84 Those look like data drivers for the chip bus... all that DRAM. Well, all those DRAM chips... 1MB is hardly "lots" by modern standards, but this was 1986.
#86 Yeah, there's me and Fish. In late 2005 and early 2006, Commodore was reeling over financial problems, and there were a total of three rounds of layoffs. On the other side of that inscription, it used to read "the few, the proud, the remaining" and then we had the initials for everyone still left in Commodore West Chester Engineering. For some inexplicable reason, we didn't get to keep that... but that's probably why we got to keep the HAYNIE/FISHER.
#87 Yeah, the case was big and ugly, and very industrial -- a product of Commodore's German division. The location of the mouse and keyboard ports was a very bad idea... we had crazy problems with noise from the memory array coupling to those ports.. there's a big reason PCs always put this stuff in the back, or run cables to the front if they need a front port.
Anyway, thanks for featuring one of my creations!

This takes me back. I had an A2000 with the upgraded CPU, 68020 if I recall. I also had an A1000 and an A500 before that, I still have an A3000 sitting in my basement. Wonder if there is still a market to sell it. At one time there were a lot of avid AMIGA users still looking for the classics.

I think they used 880k on low density (720k) disks, and for some reason i seem to remember not all pc drives were compatible, but I can't remember why.
I still have in my garage a CD32 with an SX32 expansion (broken connector), A500 with supra turbo and supra expansion drive, and an A4000 accelerated with a Cybervision 64! I have now given in to the PC dark side.

Was actually started by Commodore guys, but they split off before Amiga: Bruce Crockett, Al Charpentier, and Bob Yannes. They left pretty much as I was starting up at Commodore.
A friend of mine from college worked for Ray Kurzweil, but over at his speed recognition company, "Kurzweil Applied Intelligence"... I think the synth people were across the hall. He got a company discount on a K250... sweet piece of kit, back then.

Commodore did not in fact sell everything to Dell. IIRC Dell, lost the bids on Amiga. The technology was sold to a German Computer company Who then Renamed themselves Amiga Technologies and Sold the A1200 and A4000 Tower under the re-banded name. Story goes, the over exerted themselves with both the PC computers and the Amiga Computers. They were even close to launching "The Walker" a totaly new Amiga. When they bent bankrupt, they sold all of the Amiga stuff to Gateway, who also produced some prototypes of new Amiga computers. From there it gets kind of fuzzy Some say Bill McEwen purchased all rights and Amiga Inc holds them today, Some say Gateway (Now owned by Acer) still owns the rights.
The sad truth is that the Amiga rights since the demise of Commodore is always going to be questioned and seems to have a lot of shady past to it.

Did they work when you parked them?
I took my A2000 off the shelf after 10 years (1998 to 2008) and it fired right up, and even still had the correct time and date, with the time only off by about 4 minutes!

I had no idea the design was consistent enough to be shared between platforms. I expected a completely different interface. Turns out reality was somewhere between the two. :-)
Still, a minor difference.

"It broke my heart when I moved and had to unload a bunch of old stuff. Since I didn't have a working monitor and couldn't find one,....."
Sorry to hear that, I've got 2 brand new (and a couple of used ones) 1084s monitors in my garage (no to mention other Amiga stuff!)
I'm always say I'm going to put it all on ebay but somehow I never get around to it.

The Amiga certainly needed a 15kHz interlaced monitor for most of its existence, and none of the PC monitors supported this. But today..the dual 1200p LCD monitors I have here in my office no only support a normal 15kHz input (CVBS, Y/C, or VGA), but they do the de-interlacing themselves, just like most any other digital display. So at least some modern monitors are, finally, Amiga ready :-)

Dave, It's awesome that you took the time to comment on this article, many long-time Amiga fans, myself included, appreciate the insight you provide.
I was an Amiga 1000 -> Amiga 2000 user, with my 2000 being heavily used as a dual-headed, triple OS beast.
My Amiga 2000 was affectionately known as Frankenputer:
* Amiga OS and MAC emulator (running in a window on the Amiga monitor)
* Intel 286 bridgeboard with MS-DOS, using a 30 MB MFM hard-drive on an ISA card controller, and an ISA VGA card driving a VGA monitor (sitting next to my Amiga monitor).
* I shared the MFM hard-drive back to the Amiga, since I was a college student who couldn't afford the SCSI drives that the Amiga liked to use. I customized the boot-sequence so that it would boot the Amiga from the workbench floppy, which after it got enough of the Amiga stuff working to access the bridgeboard, booted the PC-side, then shared the PC's HD back to the Amiga side and finished booting the Amiga from the PC's HD.
Life was good (and only got better).
Thanks again for your contributions -- not only to the A-2000 back in the day, but to this discussion thread.

This is awesome stuff. It's not every day that the information-hungry of us can get an engineer's personal reflections on an historical design.
And Bill -- I love this series. I don't know what it is, but I love seeing the guts of devices big, small, new and old. I was surprised to see the first teardown article, and QUITE pleasantly surprised that it caught on and flourished.
Thanks to both of you. This article was a real find today.

Thank you so much for joining my discussion and posting the correction about the Buster chip and all the other fantastic information. I've updated the image's description and added a note about your post to the first image.
Again, thank you!

The original Commodore assets were sold to ESCOM in Germany. At the time (1995), they were the second largest PC vendor in Germany, and pretty big all over Europe. The launched a division called Amiga Technologies, they didn't rename the whole company.
And in fact, Andy Finkel and I consulted with Amiga Technologies in late 1995/early 1996, with the intent on launching a new A500-class Amiga, based on the PowerPC chips. We were in talks with both Motorola and IBM on the best performance we could get for a ~$500 computer. Andy's team was looking to build a portable version of AmigaOS, with a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) and other modern goodness... the old 68K stuff being supported via emulation. We even had some somewhat interesting graphics as a possibility, using some stuff Motorola was developing. I had actually designed a totally custom architecture (not the whole chipset, but the overall architecture), but we were up against deadlines, and the fact that neither IBM nor Motorola had PPCs as core designs just yet (they did, later on).
Sadly, ESCOM basically screwed themselves, and it really wasn't anything to do with the Amiga acquisition, which was pretty small potatoes for them. They had bought chains of retail stores, and had guessed wrong about PC product demands for the 2005 Christmas season. This left them in bad enough shape that they were called into bankruptcy in the Spring or Summer of 2006... they started dismantling Amiga Technologies long before then.
They did put the A1200 and A4000T back into production. The Walker was a really a stop-gap system, something they started before Andy and I came on to the project.
At the ESCOM bankruptcy, Gateway 2000 did buy the Amiga assets, including patents and AmigaOS, the Commodore name and other stuff went off in a different direction, landing ultimately at the new Commodore, the guys who have managed to put a whole PC inside a classic C64 case (I think it's kind of cool... give the guys credit for doing what they can).
Gateway really just wanted the patents. They launched a brief project to develop their own Amiga, using Linux and/or QNX (I tried very hard to move them away from Linux, which, in 1996 was no platform for a multimedia system, but suggested QNX would be a good fit -- I had no official involvement in any of those projects), but dropped it. Sometime later, the Bill McEwan Amiga company licensed AmigaOS from Gateway, and hired Hyperion Entertainment (a video game company) to port it to the PowerPC. A move I also strongly tried to convince them was a bad idea... after Apple stopped MacOS licensing, it was clear to me the PowerPC was doomed as a desktop CPU. I'm not sure the situation between Gateway, Amiga, and Hyperion was ever made all that clear in public. Given that there's virtually no hardware available to run the PowerPC version, and certainly nothing even remotely competitive (I did suggest a PS3 port was their best bet, at least back when PS3s could easily load an alternate OS).

Dave, Which LCD brand/model is that? I have a A4000T which has been running 14 years now (non-stop as a house controller) I sure would love to plug in something other then this ole 1084 monitor.
Bill, I suspect the floppy adapter on image 26 is to make a regular PC floppy compatiable with the Amiga.
My 2nd computer (after the C-64) was the Amiga 2000. I had the 2088 bridgeboard and SCSI harddrive.
I followed up with A3000T. Sold both to purchase the A4000T. I loved the resale value, sold 2000 to school in NY for $350.00 (9yrs old) and the 3000 to NASA for $900.00 (4 yrs old).
The 4000T "talks" to my house via X10 and controlls lights, block heater, fans, and wakes me up each morning. Play CD's.
If I could upgrade the monitor, I'd spend a bit more time on it then I currently do.
LeEric

It's not everyday... anymore... that I come across questions or articles about the Amigas. So it's kind of a treat to me, too, to see these things going by.
And the A2000 was kind of my journeyman project. I had been the #2 guy on the Commodore 128, a year or so out of school. After the main guy, Bil Herd left, I was all of a sudden the top guy on the 8-bit stuff. But I had already started playing with the Amiga, and really wanted to work on that.
Commodore West Chester got our first Amiga system project in the summer of 1986, with the Amiga 500. George Robbins, Bob Welland, and Victor Andrade had figured out how to consolidate the fairly complex Amiga 1000 design into a much more compact form. As the 8-bit stuff was fading, I was brought in to help out... and of course, to learn the system.
About a month later, we got the task of taking the German Amiga 2000 design (which was essentially an Amiga 1000 with an integral Zorro bus, and the stupid PC slots for the "Bridge Board") to something more production worthy (in Commodore speak... "cheap"). That meant using the Amiga 500 chipset, and integrating the expansion bus.
This was an obvious project for George. Just before Commodore has bought Amiga, George and Bob had become the third engineering term to work on the "Commodore 900". This was a totally different personal computer, based on the 16-bit Z8000 processor. It ran a UNIX clone called Coherent, and was going to ship initially with a high resolution monochrome display. Pretty much a Sun 2 for the masses. The previous two teams failed to get it working, George and Bob did. Then it was cancelled... Commodore wasn't going to deal with two "16-bit" systems at once.
Thing was, the Amiga 500 was George's baby by then.. he didn't want to give it up. So I took on the Amiga 2000, all by myself (well, certainly with lost of help from the two A500 guys, at least in understanding what they had done with the custom chips).
Bob and I also worked on the CPU cards that created the Amiga 2500 series (68020 and 68030 powered). Bob left for Apple where he was one of the main guys on the Newton, then on to Microsoft. One of the few guys I know to have achieved a personal computer industry hat-trick!

I have dual Westinghouse 1920x1200 monitors here, L2410 I think is the model. I realized I did have my A3000 connected via the scan converter output, simply because I don't have a 23-pin Amiga to 15-pin VGA adapter handy. So I don't know for a fact if this monitor can do the upscaling from the VGA input.
But it does handle 15kHz just dandy from other inputs: CVBS (composite), Y/C, or YPrPb. I've run DVD players and camcorders (standard def, analog HD and digital HD) into these monitors. Sadly, not made anymore, and it looks like the Westinghouse company has gone for making cheap HDTVs, not monitors so much any more. A shame, too, this was a great deal for an MVA panel, rather than the lesser TN, some years back, as well as the video input support.

I think he meant compatible in a technical sense, as newer monitors that share some ancestry with HDTVs have high-bandwidth analog receivers. I could be wrong (I'm not really familiar with the Amiga video protocol), but my guess is older TVs with composite inputs wouldn't be adequate because of the low scan rate of SDTV, but classic computer monitors wouldn't speak Y/Cb/Cr.
Cool project with the house computer. I'm fiddling with a project to do the same kind of thing. I'm building a custom C codebase for Linux / Xorg / alsa to provide a touchscreen front-end for integrated (ceiling/wall) audio and environmental control. I got a 7" touch LCD from short-circuit.com and will be picking up a VIA Pico ITX board to mount in the wall behind it. Fun, fun. :-)

Most of the PC today is designed at the chip level. There's a ton of work going on there, but that also kind of locks in the design. This is why you don't see a great deal of difference from system to system. Some of it's pretty tricky at the PCB level, particularly things like high-speed DDR2/DDR3 memory layout, but the design of these is locked in by the CPU these days on AMD and Intel "i" series -- and was by the system chipset back in the "old" days of the Core2 chips.
And in fact, the number of companies actually doing motherboard design is fairly small as well. Most of those Taiwanese companies that make the boards in kits for hackers, like Gigabyte, ASUS, etc. also make main boards for Dell, HP, etc. If you're a big company, you call these guys up, tell 'em what you want, and you'll get that board... for way less than you can make it yourself, even if you're doing HP volumes. This was even becoming true about PCs in the latter days of Commodore.

when an entire platform could be the project of an engineer or two. ;-)
Well, that's really just an assumption. I'm not an engineer, but PCs today are a heck of a lot more complex. It's certainly true of computer games. It takes a movie-like production crew to release a title now that sprites and scrolling backgrounds have fallen by the wayside.